Open Writing

...'It's all part of the same thing, Joe. Men like you, you get sex and power all mixed up. Let me go first, please. I hate airport farewells, they're so corny.'...

The beautiful Victoria walks out on Joe Hussy the undercover tough guy.

Colin Dunne contues his well-told tale of i8nvestigation and intrigue. To read earlier chapters please click on http://www.openwriting.com/archives/ratcatcher/

The late afternoon flight was filled with bad-tempered businessmen who didn't want to go home to their wives in London.

'They'll be upset when they hear Auntie Marje has closed down,' I said to Victoria. She barely managed a lip-wrinkle.

She'd bathed my head and put some antiseptic on it, and she'd even managed to find some aspirin. Surprisingly, I wasn't feeling too bad. Perhaps I was getting used to having a permanent roadworks between my ears.

On the flight, I read the files. Victoria read them too. Whatever else they were, you couldn't mistake them for comedy scripts.

I'd taken three or four others, as well as the ones marked Walsh and Crocker, and I read them first. Sorry stuff, it was. Smudged ballpoint, misspelt, crude confessions of lame minds. Even so, you didn't like to think of their authors out walking the streets.

First glance must have told them that Walsh's and Crocker's were different.
Kentish must have known Walsh's writing the second he saw it: flamboyant green ink, in a sprawling scrawl. By today's standards, he'd probably be regarded as comically kinky. But thirteen years ago, from someone in his position, what he was asking Marjorie Boobs to do would certainly have had him banned from Sunday School.

Crocker's fell into a grimmer category altogether. His tight black Italianate script revealed in the most articulate terms his obsession: he was a pederast.

I've got a fairly high threshold on people's sexual choices but he left me feeling very queasy.

They'd had problems flushing him out. Pinned to the letter were the various items from the magazine which had lured him into the open.

At first they had no more to go on than the postmark — St John's Wood. What did it was a picture of a boy - the usual porn stuff— with an open letter apparently directed at Crocker himself. You wouldn't have thought an intelligent man would fall for that but somewhere in his maggot mind it set things churning. To get private letters from the boy, he gave an accommodation address in Paddington.

The next document was a note from Tidy explaining how he'd staked the place out until Crocker turned up.

The first time Marjorie had mentioned his name it sounded familiar, and I juggled with it for a while, trying to place it. Without success.

Whoever he was he wasn't short of cash. Or he hadn't been until they started bleeding him. The final sheet was a list of dates covering the past eighteen months and opposite each date was a sum of money. Two £10,000s, one £30,000, and then two big hits for £50,000 each.

The account had apparently been sealed with a cut-offline a month earlier. As some sort of private joke, the final sentence read: 'Transfer fee to Sullivan - £ 150,000.'

I remembered the earlier note and how I'd misunderstood the word Fee, and that only confused me more.

'If we could trace this Crocker ... no, I don't suppose that'd help, blackmail victims don't usually want everything out in the open. . .'

I was thinking aloud. A few doors had swung open now and I was trying to work out which ones to go through, in which order. I hadn't even noticed Victoria's reaction.

'Tidy won't be in any rush to get back,' I went on. 'We'll probably never see him again. Anyway, I don't think he did top Striker. He was keen enough to claim the credit for Hands, so I reckon he would've claimed them both. Tiger must've picked up some of all this. Christ, I wonder if Cringle was right. Anyway, we've got the car at the airport so we can head north...'

'I'm not going.'

I saw then what all this had done to her. She nibbled at the words through the clenched muscles of her face. I turned sideways in my seat and reached over for her hands. There was no give in them. I put them back in her lap.

'What's wrong?'

'Wrong? What do you think is wrong?'

She was speaking in a high-pressure whisper. All around us businessmen were strapping safety belts around their expense accounts, ready for Heathrow.

I rustled the pile of documents.

'These? Well, I can see they're a bit.unsavoury ...'

The hardening look on her face told me not to go on.

'It's not that. I'm not a child. I knew there was something wrong about Striker's death, right from the start. All right, I'll admit I wasn't expecting anything as horrible as all this. Tom Hands' death, for instance, and all these slimy people and their slimy little lives! No, I wasn't expecting any of it and quite honestly it makes me sick. But I could take all that. That's not what bothers me.'

'What does then?'

She inhaled massively and her eyes closed for a few seconds. Then she breathed out and opened them.

'You,' she said. 'Just you.'

'Why?' I was genuinely puzzled. But the trouble in her eyes went back a long way and I should have seen it earlier. Then she told me why I hadn't, and I knew she was right.

She took my hand in hers and patted it in a now-you're-for-it gesture.

'Joe, you hardly know I'm here.'

'What are you talking about?'

'All this excitement, the guns, the fighting, you're so wrapped up in it that you don't notice me at all.'

'That's not true. What about last night?'

Anger reared up in her face. 'What's that got to do with it?'

'All right,' I said, backing off. 'Okay, so I've been busy ...'

'You don't know what I mean, do you? You really don't. What I'm trying to tell you . . .' she sat back, sighed, and then sat forward to try again. 'You love it all. I can see the excitement in your face. It blinds you to everything else. Look at you now, you can't wait to get back to it. To the hunting and the chasing. And the killing. That's what I can't accept. You enjoy the killing.'

Astonished, I sat and looked at her. In front of us, a man raised himself and looked over the seat. We both ignored him. There was the thump and rush of landing and an adenoidal voice told us to stay in our seats.

And I couldn't think of any way of telling her that I couldn't kill a man. Worse, that I was ashamed of it.

She was calm again now, as though the wheels' contact with earth had drawn off her fury.

'So what I suggest is this, Joe. You go off and do whatever you feel you've got to. I don't want any part of it. Not even for Striker's sake. Then, if you want to, give me a ring, and we'll have to see what it's worth.'

'What will you do?'

'I've got a club to run.'

'Under the circumstances, Victoria, this is going to sound pretty casual, but I don't see how you can do this after last night. No, hang on, let me say it. How can you walk away from something as good as this?'

'Like this,' she said, rising from her seat. 'I walk away like this.'

'You haven't answered my question.'

Passengers were standing in the aisle now, reaching down coats and propping cases on the seats. She had to bend down to prevent them from hearing.

'It's all part of the same thing, Joe. Men like you, you get sex and power all mixed up. Let me go first, please. I hate airport farewells, they're so corny.'

I sat and watched as she slowly shuffled out of sight. She didn't turn round once. She wasn't a turning-round sort of person.